Müntzer,Taubes, and the Anabaptists: Emancipatory History and Political Theology

ABSTRACT

The radical apocalypticism of the sixteenth century mystic and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer has served as an enduring resource for the political left, from early investigations by Engels and Bloch to the recent works of Alberto Toscano and Wu Ming. In one of his lesser-studied works – the 1947 dissertation Occidental Eschatology – Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes places Müntzer at a key juncture in the history of eschatology, first by situating him at the end of the Reformation period, and then by connecting his revolutionary apocalypticism to the critiques of Hegel leveled by Marx and Kierkegaard. This study aims to give a new perspective on Taubes as a philosopher of history, first by showing potentially surprising connections between Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology and the historiography of Anabaptism, and second by making suggestions about how Taubes’ distinctively emancipatory philosophy of history might contribute to thinking about time and history within contemporary political theology.     

Modernity East and West: Melodrama and yanqing in Shanghai’s popular culture*

The rise of the melodrama as a literary and theatrical genre appears to have had a co-relation with the rise of industrial cities in modern times around the globe from Europe, North America, to East Asia. In China, this phenomenon manifested itself in the yanqing (lit. speaking of feelings) genre that dominated the popular culture scene in Shanghai in the most part of the twentieth century. While the yanqing genre was an expression of particular Chinese modern experiences, it also provided a channel for these local experiences to partake in and enrich a global experience of modernity. This study shows how yanqing arts helped ordinary Shanghai residents deal with changing patterns of gender, love, and family relations in the fast-growing and modernizing city. Through such re-examination of the yanqing culture this study tries to shed new light on some important questions in modern Chinese history and help correct traditional elite views of this history.     

Immermann's Münchhausen and the Post-Romantic Predicament

This article analyzes Cuban novels Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965) by Edmundo Desnoes and Livadia (1999) by José Manuel Prieto in the context of two epochal historical events: the Cuban revolution and the Cuban postrevolution (or the beginning of the so-called Special Period). The essay explores the political precariousness of transitional regimes from three different points of view: epistemological, ideological, and emotional. I argue that transitional periods call for new modes of representation where the past and the uncertainty of the future coalesce to form nihilistic spaces, or to open up the possibility for new modes of narration.     

Life Narratives of the Past: Herta Müller on Communist Romania

Narratives of the past are created and, in some cases, recreated, through literary works by revealing fragments from past traumas, reinterpreting past events, or focusing on historical events held in the collective memory. In a text dedicated to excavation and memory, Walter Benjamin notes that when approaching one’s personal past, one must proceed like a person digging in the ground, and not be afraid of returning repeatedly to the same matter. This essay argues that Herta Müller uses this method to address the personal and collective Romanian past, creating through her novels a literary remembrance of the past that deeply resonates with the memories of those affected by totalitarian regimes. Never presenting a linear or whole narrative of the past but rather the pieces of a life-narrative puzzle, Müller’s literary world becomes a medium through which the victims of totalitarian regimes can regain control over the narratives of their past.     

Homespun manhood and the war against masculinity: community leisure on the US home front, 1917–19

Between the Civil War and World War I, America saw a return to militarised, heroic, warrior forms of masculinity. When the United States entered the war in 1917, however, the demands for belligerent forms of military manhood subsided, and were replaced by a desire to reattach manhood to the domestic realm. In this article, I examine a set of government programmes designed to manage soldiers' leisure time while they were stationed in training camps across the US. I argue that these home front activities betray an anxiety about sending American soldiers to fight in an overseas war for the first time in national history. The US was a young nation state fighting its first international war against other equally statist nations. In this context, it was no longer strategically useful for military manhood to be severed from the idea of home. Rather, as soldiers would be fighting for long periods in an alien territory, it behoved the military and government to temper traditional configurations of warrior manhood, and focus instead on exposing soldiers to as much home and family as they could safely arrange.     

The semiotics of play: A bridge between nature and culture?

Thomas A. Sebeok. The Play of Musement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 312 pp. Illustrations and 3 Appendices. $35.00     

The Israeli left between culture and politics: Tzavta and Mapam, 1956–1973

The Tzavta club in Tel Aviv (until 1956 called the Center for Progressive Culture) was founded in 1946 by Hakibbutz Ha'artzi-Hashomer Hatza'ir kibbutz movement. Cultural activity was a traditional means used by political movements to increase their influence in society. However, as part of the “cultural front” of Hashomer Hatza'ir and Mapam, Tzavta had the additional goal of strengthening “ideological collectivism” among the members of the movement and the party. This article analyzes Tzavta's activity between 1956 and 1973, arguing that it was created to combine two functions – cultural and political. Although the leadership of Mapam intended to use the club as a political tool for disseminating the party's views and controlling internal conflicts, Tzavta became increasingly culturally autonomous and eventually uncontrollable.     

War stories: British and American writers in/on the Italian front (1915–18)

In 1919 the British historian G. M. Trevelyan complained about the ‘not very large stock of English literature on Italy’s part in the war’ that had just ended, a phenomenon he attributed to ‘the mutual ignorance of the English-speaking and Italian peoples’. Nearly a hundred years later the situation seems to be no better. Secondary sources as there are devote only passing mention (if any) to the war stories that were put together by British and American writers who visited, served or worked as volunteers in the Italian front between 1915 and 1918. This article intends to give some details about the Italian front writing of these committed individuals, whose praiseworthy contribution to the war effort was, indeed, fighting the above-mentioned ignorance.     

A female war correspondent on the Italian front, 1915–17: the Austrian travel journalist and photographer Alice Schalek

In July 1915, Alice Schalek was accredited to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) as one of a small number of female war correspondents, publishing her war reports and photographs in the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse and in the illustrated German magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Schalek’s writings and photographs were very popular, but also sharply criticized in some quarters for their alleged lack of objectivity and a tendency to glorify the war. Her most prominent critic was the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus, whose negative judgment dominated Schalek’s historical reputation for many decades. Focusing on Schalek’s assignments to the Italian front during 1915–17, this article looks at the working conditions faced by Schalek as a female war reporter and reconstructs the war images she transmitted to the public through her writings, photographs, and lectures. Moreover, it asks in what ways Schalek’s work reflects a female perspective on the war.     

The Profumo affair in popular culture: The Keeler Affair (1963) and ‘the commercial exploitation of a public scandal’

This article demonstrates that the Profumo affair, which obsessed Britain for large parts of 1963, was not simply a political scandal, but was also an important cultural event. Focussing on the production of The Keeler Affair, a feature film that figured prominently in contemporary coverage of the scandal but which has been largely overlooked since, the article shows that this film emerged from a situation in which cultural entrepreneurs, many of them associated with the satire boom, sought to exploit the scandal for financial gain. Many Profumo-related cultural products found an audience, and thus formed an integral part of, and helped to shape public attitudes towards, the Profumo affair. However, these products did not go uncontested, and resistance to them, and especially to the idea that Keeler might benefit materially from her role in the scandal, speak to concerns about cultural mediations of sex, politics and humour in early-1960s Britain.     

Visions/versions of the war: Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Juan Pujol on the Italian front

In 1915, the Spanish journalist Juan Pujol visited the Italian front. His reports appeared in ABC, and were later incorporated in his book In Galitzia and the Isonzo (1916). A few months later, the Spanish writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala visited the same territories. His reports appeared in El Imparcial (Madrid) and La Prensa (Buenos Aires), and were later published in his book Herman in Chains (1917). The poetics evident in the reports of both writers were clearly different, not only for ideological reasons (Juan Pujol supported the Central Empires; Pérez de Ayala favored the Allies), but also for discursive reasons: the reflexive and digressive culturalism of Pérez de Ayala, for example, contrasted vividly with the direct narrative of Juan Pujol. However, since both writers shared some stereotypes about war and used a common repertoire of rhetorical and stylistic strategies, there are significant similarities between their texts.